Negotiation is one of the most difficult, and in my opinion, poorly understood aspects of the sales process. If there's at least one thing I've learned about leading sales reps, epecially less experiences ones, they do not know how to negotiate effectively. Even if they run a flawless sales process, they give up loads of value after having created so much in everything they did prior. While the customer ultimately gets the better end of this deal, it's not effective for building a business over the long term. Heavy discounting erodes margin and eliminates a business's ability to invest back into their own people, which in turn, limits the quality of the total customer experience.

I remember when Facebook came around, in the early 2000s (mass adoption started in ~2004-2005). Only 5 years later, social media channels started to take over as the preferred user medium (2009) and actually surpassed email as the primary channel in which people spend their time in 2007.

Why We Keep Emailing Even thought It's Killing Us

While email seems like the "cool" thing to do, especially when companies like MailChimp and Constant Contact are touting a 14-23% open rate for emails ... I equate email to smoking. It's easy. You send just one mass email campaign (first cigarette), get a small handful of responses (first nicotine high), and you're hooked.

What the end user of email (smoking) is missing is the reality that over 95% of the messages they're sending are at BEST doing nothing, and at worst creating brand damage (personal, company, or both). The remaining 5% are responses akin to, "Thanks for reaching out, but I'm not interested", or "Sure, let's set up some time to talk."

And of course, there are still studies that claim email marketing has a 40X return on investment, which just makes the whole thing more like smoking because it's just like Big Tobacco getting researchers to do studies showing that there is "no hard proof" that smoking causes cancer.

Don't Get Me Wrong - Email Is Still Effective In the Right Context

I know it sounds like I'm just complaining and trying to convince people that it's the "end" for email. But that's not completely how I feel either. I just think that B2B email marketing should be left to marketers -- people who are studying the effectiveness of messaging and the data to prove which types of emails work better than others. NOT salespeople. The salesperson should only be using email-based selling if a few specific conditions are met:

It's also time for us to accept the reality that an 75-85% NO OPEN rate, and even high, NO RESPONSE rate is unacceptable. For we salespeople to survive and remain critical to a business, we must evolve. We must find new channels for communication. We must be the pioneers for breaking through the noise email has created for us all.

PS... this is the chart from People.AI that inspired me to write this article. It shows that I have received over 3,000 emails in the first 22 days in August 2016. Counting business days only, that's about 190 emails per day. In fairness, this is indeed a bit on the high side, but I don't think it's that far off the normal mark for anyone working in B2B sales today. All that noise just makes me think and say, "Enough is enough... I'm just going to ignore all the emails I get."